Saturday, January 31, 2015

Panpiina is an old school player who played both Darkstalkers and 3rd Strike. No wonder he's good at this game which is footsie based. He's currently No.1 on Blade Arcus CL ranking (CL is rating or Street Fighter's BP). But most importantly, he has 94% win rate over 1,871 matches played.

SpinKing, as mentioned before, played various games, but Blade Arcus is his main game now. He's Japan's No.2, right behind Panpiina, but played more matches than anyone in Japan.

Wednesday, January 28, 2015

This is casual matches video featuring SpinKing (Kaitenou) from Game Chariot game center from January 16.

SpinKing played various games (DBFC/BlazBlue/P4U/UNI/Marvel/etc) but his main game is now Blade Arcus. He's currently Japan's No.2 overall and is No.1 Altina player. He plays more Blade Arcus matches than anyone in Japan, with 2,498 matches (73.57% win rate) as of today.

Altina, the projectile specialist, may look powerful but she's a charge character, so she can be exploited. Altina can also be counterpicked with Pairon and Roselinde.

Thursday, January 22, 2015

What's the true standard of choosing a game? Is it based on tournament players or fanbase? Is it based on American scenes or international? Do you also request number from Japanese organizers? Do you count sales? Do you accept unlocalized games since you accept unfinished? Why is it inconsistent? How do you explain some games with smaller and less active scenes than others getting the spots? If money hatting is OK then why don't you let subcommunities have a donation drive and pay for the spots? What's your target audience? What's the point of "world largest" when you don't consider international scenes? Do you think you can get away with the side tournament trick AKA throwing a bone to please the scenes you dishonor? How do you feel now more than 20% of Evo isn't a fighting game? Why don't we call it Neuro already? Why don't you add LoL if you care that much about viewers? You hate being called e-sports because you want to feel independent so why you act like a tool? You hate being called e-sports because you want to retain that precious influence from simply being the old gen so why make yourself irrelevant? Can't you use that negotiation power and come up with a better solution? Why are you holding back the community? What's your escape plan if Nintendo decides to pull out and hold its own tournament while the rejected and legit fighting game scenes also do the same?

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

This is a good video showcasing all Raging Demon Daigo Umehara made at Canada Cup's Master Series.

Umehara is now used to Evil Ryu as you can see almost no combo drop in an entire tournament (very different from mid-2014). He started using kara RD (cancelling hop kick into RD) in a real match since Capcom Pro Tour Asia, and the technique now plays an important role in his gameplay.

With how he plays the character now, the fans slowly forget about his Ryu, because his Evil Ryu still shows strong footsie and his main source of damage comes from open play (as opposed to set play such as okizeme cross-up).

Although Umehara's Evil Ryu is already impressive, and is the best Evil Ryu ever, perhaps it's too early to say it's at full potential, knowing how good he is.

Influential Smash Bros. tournament organizer Johnathan "Alex Strife" Lugo will no longer be involved with this year's Apex 2015 tournament following a string of allegations involving sexual harassment and other wrongdoing, an Apex representative said today.

French Bread's Nobuya Narita* and Kamone Serizawa** had apologized yesterday for an appropriate tweet made by Narita after the Under Night In-birth national tournament (Jan 18).

*representative and a cofounder
**battle planner and programmer

Narita's tweet in question was

"It may sound like trolling again to say it's good that Gordeau and Merkava didn't win (laugh), still I'm glad that character such as Waldstein and Yuzuriha won. Thank you all the participants for the good games. (bow)"

(The winning team used Waldstein, Yuzuriha, Hyde. Other teams in semifinals have Gordeau.)

That apparently made fans angry because it's inappropriate in every ways. Narita later apologized and explained that since people think those two characters are over the top, he felt that the result was preferred.

Serizawa also apologized for the incident. He said that he gave the person some serious advice, and they'll prevent something like this from happening again.

Please note that Serizawa himself also has his own problem. The man is seen from time to time doing indirect negative campaigning, by tweeting or retweeting a picture or video about a bug or flaw of other fighting games.

French Bread is the developer of Melty Blood, Under Night In-birth, and Dengeki Bunko Fighting Climax.

Monday, January 19, 2015

Leisureland Akihabara game center held its 5th Blade Arcus tournament on January 18.

The tournament featured Japan's No.1 player who is a Sakuya player (also a veteran/Darkstalker player). He played almost 1,500 matches now but his win rate is still 93%. He was on 182 wins win streak until Japan's No.1 Pairon stopped him on that day.

Thursday, January 15, 2015

A Japanese player reported that a weird bug is found in the arcade version of P4U2 (Persona 4 The Ultimax Ultra Suplex Hold) after the latest update which arrived today (version 2.0).

The bug caused the CPU to take control of the player's character after the victim tried to challenge someone. A hundred yen was lost in the process.

In other news, Arc System Works already issued a statement regarding a known bug from today's update which prevents PSR from working properly when using new characters (Rise, Amada, Adachi, Marie, Margaret).

Tip from Mad Catz Japan. It was announced yesterday that Daigo Umehara will go to Taiwan to participate Street Fighter V stage show (with GamerBee, Ono, Ayano) at PlayStation booth in Taipei Game Show 2015 on January 31. There will be an exhibition match.

Note that it is most likely that Umehara will fly back to Japan immediately after this event to play the exhibition match in Tokaigi on February 1.

Thursday, January 1, 2015

During the talk about Street Fighter V and an ideal fighting game, Umehara pointed out that the real fun in a game lies in pushing buttons (lever/stick doesn't count).

Umehara explained that it all comes down to the fact that people want to push buttons and get some reward. A game is more fun when they can do this as much as they want. As a result, a game is less fun if it promotes defensive play style–because they are given less time to push buttons.

Umehara also added that you will be penalized for doing nothing in other games such as mahjong and poker. That makes him wonder why it is viable to do nothing in fighting games. He suggested that a fighting game should promote play-making, for example, by limiting how many times you can block (10 times) or escape a throw (5 times) and reducing timer from 99 seconds to 40-50 seconds per round.

Umehara said that, just like in real world, people who work deserve recognition, regardless of their skill. Beginners should be able to win simply because they work harder in a match.

As for Street Fighter V, Umehara feels that the game's pace is too slow, as there was nothing else to do during the long block stun. He suggested that players should be able to perform something, not just waiting for the sequence to finish. He understands that it is still in development, but warned that Capcom definitely don't want to launch the game without some tweaks.